


repeat, repeat, repeat

by nebulousviolet



Category: H.I.V.E. Series - Mark Walden
Genre: Gen, One Shot, but my writing does not show it lol, general series tws for mental illness etc, i want raven to be happy, reincarnation/time loop au, tw implied torture, tw suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:41:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26834608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulousviolet/pseuds/nebulousviolet
Summary: The first time Natalya dies, she’s sixteen.
Relationships: Natalya | Raven & Maximilian Nero
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	repeat, repeat, repeat

**Author's Note:**

> hey hens i’m back!!  
> i wasn’t really sure what to rate this. the violence is a little more intense than canon, as is the discussion of mental illness, but not that explicit (i’ve never been a whump gal). tw for suicide, death, you know the drill.

The first time Natalya dies, she’s sixteen.

(Pietor Furan, as it turns out, cannot wait six more weeks to kill her. She doesn’t die on her feet with katanas in hand; she dies in the Glasshouse, throat slowly being split open, ribs cracked and fingernails ripped out of their nail beds. And she thinks: at least it’s over.  _ Thank God it’s over. _ )

When she wakes up, eleven years old and on her first night at the Glasshouse again, she barely makes it to the toilet in time before she finds herself retching and heaving on the floor. Her hands are still sore. She thinks that maybe the whole thing’s a nightmare, a bad dream, but then two months later one of the older boys stands on her windpipe just a bit too long, hits her head just a bit too hard, and Natalya wakes up, eleven, again.

(She thinks: this is hell. She thinks: what did I do to deserve getting stuck here?)   
(She thinks: I can’t let them know I come back.  _ I can’t. _ )

* * *

There are some things that cannot be changed.

  1. Tolya and Dimitri always die.



  1. Escape attempts are not successful, no matter how ingenious.



  1. Anastasia Furan, for all her whispering and vague messages, does not reveal what she so desperately needs Natalya for.



  1. She never makes it past sixteen.



* * *

They all think she’s crazy, when she lunges for Valerian’s throat and  _ squeezes _ , when she sits and talks to people who she knows, deep down, aren’t really there. ( _ Do you believe in ghosts, Natalya? _ )

They have no idea.

(It’s not always Pietor who kills her. She lets Tolya win once, is conscious for long enough to see Anastasia step in and shoot him in the head. She turns the katana on herself another time, thinking that maybe if _ she  _ does it, this time will be different. Memorably, there is an occasion where two of the girls in her dormitory team up to take her out, one of them holding her down while she thrashes as the other holds a pillow over Natalya’s face.

It’s memorable only for how relatively painless it is.)

But she’s not crazy. She knows she’s not. Some of the memories carry over, and some of them don’t, and the ones that do  _ change things.  _ If it wasn’t real, it wouldn’t do that. Surely it wouldn’t do that?

* * *

The worst one by far is Diabolus Darkdoom.

It’s the closest she’s ever gotten to  _ making it out _ , and she’s going to kill Nero,  _ she has to kill Nero _ , because some stupid part of her thinks that if she does and Pietor kills her - because she knows how much he wants to kill her, knows it because he  _ has _ \- then maybe the cycle won’t reset. Destiny, or something equally moronic.

(But Diabolus Darkdoom shoots her.)

He shoots her, and the bullet goes a centimetre further to the left than it should, and she’s dying again, Hong Kong instead of endless concrete and steel, and Nero keeps talking about wanting to save her but Natalya has died enough times to know that there’s no saving  _ this.  _ At least she’s on her feet this time. At least she can see the sky.

* * *

This time, when she wakes up, her hair is already short. Her failed escape attempt in Siberia happens when she is twelve, not thirteen. She only spends a month in isolation, not six.

The message is clear.  _ A gear has shifted.  _ This time, she will not be coming back.

Natalya thinks about killing herself with the katana for the second time. She doesn’t. (She wants to make it to Hong Kong again. If she’s going to die one last time, she wants it to be there.)

(“Because you died!” she screams. “And so did I!”)

(Repeat, repeat, repeat.)

* * *

The bullet moves. A centimetre to the right, this time.

(This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.)

* * *

Nero recites a Tale of Two Cities and her eyes glaze over. 

The med staff keep whispering diagnoses back and forth, like trading cards. They’re not sure what to do with her, she knows, this strange sixteen-year-old girl with a gunshot wound and fits of catatonia. One of them whispers  _ paranoid schizophrenia _ , as if she can’t  _ hear _ , and she starts seizing, thrashing around so destructively that the nurses warn Nero to stand back. And Nero keeps talking, keeps telling her about Sidney and Lucie and she screams until her throat is hoarse.

* * *

The Glasshouse burns, and Raven’s past lives burn with it.

She can’t wait to turn seventeen.

* * *

Otto Malpense saves her life, or so the story goes. He begs Nero not to kill her - begs on her behalf - as if he knows that this time she’s not coming back. And he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. Even after everything, Raven can’t bring herself to tell Nero, so why would she tell Otto Malpense?

Except she does.

There’s not really any reason for him to be hospitalised, and they all know it: she knows it and he knows it and all the hospital staff know it. A thin excuse is the claim that he’s there for observation, for treatment of shock and grief, and it’s not really a lie, but it’s not really the truth, either. (They’re waiting to see if he snaps. To see if he ends up like - like her.)

He seems taken aback when she visits, when she sits in the squeaky plastic chair at his bedside. She has come to trust Otto Malpense, but she has also come to like him. The animus, a shared experience nobody else in the school can relate to, binds them together.

“I am going to tell you a true story,” she says, surprising herself even as she speaks, “on two conditions. One, you don’t tell anyone. That includes Fanchu, and your little girlfriend, and Nero. Two, you don’t treat me as if you feel sorry for me afterwards. Do you understand?”

Otto Malpense, now the same age she was when she died for the last time, tilts his head and nods.

(There are some details she leaves out. The first death. Sobbing on her hands and knees as she begs for someone,  _ anyone _ , to fix this, to fix her. Ripping out her hair, scratching her forearms, desperate to prove that it’s real. That she’s  _ real. _ Some bedtime stories are not for children.)

He doesn’t laugh. She didn’t think he would. Instead, he says, “Do you think it’s like that for Lucy?”

Raven thinks of the Sinistre girl. Her dark hair, her blue eyes, her striking resemblance to a traitor. The way she had gasped as she died. She says, “For her sake, I hope not.”

* * *

She’s drowning in a canal in Venice.

(She’s not going to die. She’s  _ not _ .)

Otto Malpense stops the ship long enough for her to claw her way back up. She pretends she didn’t hear Diabolus’s protests at being forced to save her. (She trusts him. It’s what she would’ve done. But he’s killed her before, even if he doesn’t remember it.)

* * *

The Glasshouse burns again. Raven is getting sick of cycles.

* * *

“Do you think I’m crazy?” she asks Nero.

She’s not really sure which answer she wants. If he says no, then that’s bad judgement; he’s watched her scrape herself bloody and raw, stare blankly at whitewashed walls, threaten to kill everyone in the room and then herself. If he says yes, then she’s not sure who  _ doesn’t. _

“I think you were ill,” Nero chooses his words carefully, “and then you got better.”

“I died in there,” she says suddenly. 

“I know.”

“I’m being literal, Max,” she snaps, irritated. “I died. Fifty-eight times. I relived it  _ fifty-eight  _ times.”

(She’s shouting. Why is she shouting?)

“What changed?” Nero asks her.

“I met you,” she says. Raven is suddenly very tired.

* * *

She gets to kill Anastasia eventually. When Nero realises he’s never going to get the truth about Elena. It’s not as satisfying as she dreamed it would be.

* * *

She’s not going to die.

She’s not.

She’s  _ not. _


End file.
